The Application of Collaborative Design in Taiwan's Textile Industry

Due to Taiwan join WTO and quotas cancellation, textile goods faced global competition. With the short life cycle of the textile market and demand uncertainty in market, it leads to increasing pressure on the textile industry. Brand vendors start to search partners and hope to solve these problems through information sharing and collaboration. After sixty-year’s development, textile industry in Taiwan had established a complete supply chain system. Beside, the ROC Government promoted electronic industry in 1999, which assisted textile industry to build the collaborative design platform that contributed to the textile manufacturers and own brand vendors link each other. Through the concept of the collaborative design, enterprise masters the markets and share information with suppliers immediately to achieve time to market. This study introduced collaborative application deep in Taiwan textile industry. Through literature review on collaboration design, information technology and strategy to build collaborative design application reference model. By the case study, we observe collaboration applied most deeply in apparel industry. Enterprise size has a significant effect in information technology application. Spinning, Dyeing and Apparel industry relate to the selection of materials, pigments and clothing production, so their strategies are early involvement. Finally, we suggested that the textile industry in Taiwan should control the market information, and enhance own knowledge/skills to achieve minimum produce cost with the maximum product value. The study indicated that central manufacturers could maintain competitive in the global market only through collaborative design which integrated the central manufacturers, suppliers, and customers together.